Part I: In which our family makes unexpected plans and sets off for Nantucket, accompanied by a harpooner named Queequeg
My husband Frank and I tried to reason with her. We pointed out that we'd already made plans to spend the holiday with the relatives in New Jersey. But Marina, who can be very persuasive, conjured up the picture of an old house with a fireplace, set in a landscape of swirling snow. And she wouldn't give up on it.
"Your image sounds like something out of a Hollywood movie," I said, as I felt my resolve weakening, several days into her New England schtick. "Have you ever seen Christmas in Connecticut with Barbara Stanwyck?"
"Connecticut isn't the real New England... at least not the New England I was picturing," Marina answered, steering us back on topic.
Frank and I exchanged glances. The truth is that our daughter, consciously or not, had hit on one of our weak spots. For many years, we have both been aficionados of small, quaint American villages of the type Thornton Wilder probably had in mind when he wrote Our Town.
After years of searching, we've come to the realization that nothing quite like Wilder's archetypal American town actually exists, and probably never did. But, in the process of looking, we've scrutinized quite a few areas of the Northeast. And even today we don't need to drink too many glasses of wine before we are willing to fall into our George and Emily routine, parodying the characters' famous love scene just for fun.
"We're are going to spend Christmas day in New Jersey. We've already promised," said Frank, finally laying down the law. Then, as it always does, his voice softened. "But I don't see why we couldn't go to New England two days later."
And so I found myself on the internet, researching B&Bs and calculating travel times. Shortly thereafter, I heard myself saying, "If we're going to go to New England, we should really do this right and stay in the ultimate New England town, on Nantucket."
Little Nantucket island, which sits in the Atlantic, thirty miles off the tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, has what is probably the most beautiful and well-preserved small town in America. Its narrow, cobbled streets are lined with classic 17th, 18th and early 19th century houses that will transport anyone who's willing back to the days when whaling ships ruled the seas and some of the richest sea captains in the world built their homes on the island.
These days Nantucket is a top notch summer resort and it commands the prices to match. During the summer, its beaches are lined with browning bodies, its restaurants crowded with diners and its docks packed with yachts. But seventy-five years ago, the island was just emerging from an economic tail spin that had begun after the Civil War, when the world replaced whale oil with petroleum as the fuel of choice.
Like many historic towns, Nantucket's preservation began by accident. When the American whaling boom went bust in the 1860s, all building on the island stopped. With no local jobs to speak of, most residents fled to the mainland in search of work. And the town, with its archeological slice of American architecture, ranging from modest, grey-shingled Quaker houses to opulent Greek Revival mansions, remained frozen in time for almost a century.
My rundown of the economic history of Nantucket, however, did not captivate Marina. "Can we stay someplace with a fireplace? And do you think it will snow?" was all she wanted to know. Snow was beyond my job description, I told her, but a fireplace seemed possible.
Luckily for our budget, the day after Christmas marks the start of the discount season on Nantucket. According to the man answering the phone at the Chamber of Commerce, Christmas week is the one time of the year when even sixth generation Nantucketers tend to go off island.
"The good news is: you'll find discounts. The bad news is: most things are closed," he told me, with classic New England deadpan.
We booked three nights in a suite with a fireplace in an old house on North Water Street, not far from the center of town, and went back to wrapping Christmas presents. We would open shiny, beribboned boxes on Christmas day with the relatives. But the big gift would be Nantucket, two days later.
As a typically stressed out New Yorker, I was secretly pleased that the island would be half closed. I imagined myself in my bathrobe, spending hours in front of the fireplace, reading. I was even looking forward to the forced confinement of the five-hour drive north and the two-hour ferry ride from Hyannis.
In preparation for the trip, I bought the audio book version of Moby Dick. It had been years since I'd read Herman Melville's dark tale of the crew that ships out of Nantucket, on the Pequod. I couldn't wait to listen to the novel with Frank and Marina.
This would not be my first trip to Nantucket. The island holds a special place in my memories. I vacationed there first at the age of three and returned every third or fourth summer, throughout my childhood.
From those early vacations, I remember a pocketful of summertime pictures: sand dunes and beach roses, bicycles, white picket fences entwined with morning glories. From my parents, I'd heard tales of Nantucket in the 1940s, before tourism had hit its stride: ramshackle rooming houses on the edge of town and people swimming in the bay at night, their bodies shimmering with phosphorescence.
As an adult, I returned to the island occasionally, renting a room for $20 a night, in the days before B&Bs became chic. But all these Nantucket memories were summertime images. Nobody I knew had ever been there at Christmas.
Not knowing what to expect, we packed wool hats and snow boots, umbrellas and raincoats. At dawn on December 27th we piled our suitcases, books, laptops, tapes and CDs into the car and headed north.
Melville's seafaring narrator, Ishmael, had done it a little differently, of course. "I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for the Cape Horn and the Pacific," he tells readers.
Ishmael's goal was adventure on the high seas. Nantucket was only his stepping off point. Our ambitions, involving snowy, cobbled lanes, floral wallpaper and a warm fireplace, were more modest. But then, as some critics have observed, next to Melville, we are all small potatoes.
In the days leading up to our little voyage, I'd given a lot of thought to Moby Dick and how a modern teen might react to it. Compared with her peers, Marina has a high tolerance for the antique. In recent years, she has performed in six or seven Shakespeare plays and has voluntarily rented and watched numerous Jane Austin movies.
Still, Melville does not go down like Kate Beckinsale. Even in his own time, readers found his greatest book ponderous and Melville was accused of having made, "an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact."
Hoping to ward off an instant dismissal, I forewarned Marina that Moby Dick is an adventure story that sometimes seems to progress at the speed of glacial melt.
"This is not one of those fast-paced action books. It's poetic, philosophical, meditative. You've got to get yourself on the slow track to appreciate it," I warned, as we sped along the Cross-Bronx Expressway. From behind the wheel, Frank shot me a baleful look.
"OK," said Marina, who was already unpacking her laptop in the back seat. I knew she was humoring me. But that was fine. All I wanted was for her to carve out a few hours' attention for the book.
Evidently the editor of our audio tape had worried about some of the same issues that I had. Mercifully, he'd deftly abridged 536 pages into under 5 hours. There was a chance we could actually complete Moby Dick before reaching our destination, I reflected. And so we began with one of the most famous of all openings, "Call me Ishmael."
"My mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with the famous old island, which amazingly pleased me," Ishmael observes, early on. The comment elicited a cheer from the passengers in our white Chevrolet.
At first, the story moved quickly. The scene where Ishmael first meets Queequeg, the tattooed harpooner from the South Sea islands, is one of my favorites in all literature.
Our narrator Ishmael is asleep in bed at the rough-and-tumble Spouter Inn, when Queequeg, jumps under the covers with him, a tomahawk pipe between his teeth. It sounds like something that might have happened in the Wild West or even the East Village in 1968, but this the mid-nineteenth century in puritan New England.
As Melville describes it, Ishmael is briefly terrified by his unexpected bedfellow, but Queequeg's polite demeanor soon wins him over. Before long he has an epiphany, "Better sleep with a sober cannibal than with a drunken Christian."
In our car, this line elicited appreciative howls all around. If I had forgotten why Melville, despite his slow, cogitating prose, is still mercilessly modern, I was instantly reminded.
We listened on as the Chevrolet plowed through the grey December sludge of north-bound highways. The elusive Captain Ahab had not yet appeared, though the arhythmic clunk of his ivory leg crossed and re-crossed the quarterdeck, drumming out premonitions of doom.
Marina, too, was overcome with premonitions... premonitions about her homework. She sat in the back seat, iBook on her lap, surrounded by stacks of rumpled papers. "Mom," she said finally, "I've got to make a dent in this school work."
Sad to say, the great white whale never breached on our horizon. Frank obligingly popped out the cassette and drove on in silence. Yet it somehow seemed that Queequeg, with his tomahawk pipe and harpoons, hovered just behind us, like a hitchhiker on the running board, singing chanties under his breath.
(END OF PART I)
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